How to Write a Family Memoir, with Terry Sue Harms

KNOWING HOW TO WRITE a family memoir includes knowing where and how to look for the details to deploy in the tale. In the case of Terry Sue Harms, author of the new book, The Strongbox: Searching for My Absent Father, just out by She Writes Press, there was a strongbox with sparse, but fascinating contents that intrigued her since her teenage years. Want to know what she did with those and how the story unfolds? Please read along as you listen to this episode.  

Marion: Hi, Terry Sue.

Terry Sue: Thank you for having me.

Marion: I’m delighted you’re here. And what a wonderful book, what a wonderful body of work you have, but this is a wonderful book, and it makes me think about one of life’s great questions, which revolves around how we navigate that space between the stories people tell us about ourselves and the version we really long to have of that tale, because this is where that book so beautifully sits. How do we ever move away from that story we’ve been told? You were told that a married man abandoned the illegitimate children he had outside his marriage.

You were one of those. How did you come to doubt this tale or feel you had outgrown it or wanted to be something more? Let’s start there.

Terry Sue: That was quite a journey. I think that as the story tells, my mother died when I was 16. And in literary terms, I would say that was my inciting incident. I did a significant turn. I had been an obedient daughter and my biggest objective was to please my alcoholic mother and stay out of the firing line of her volatile personality. And when she died, I really had to step up and take some agency for myself.

I certainly didn’t have that word, agency, as a 16 year old, but it was the inciting incident that turned me to understanding who I would be in the world separate from who my mother told me I should be in the world. And going from there, I think I really believe that I had an internal drive to expand the story. I knew the story around me was not the whole thing. And so I came by that naturally.

Marion: It’s a gorgeous concept. I knew the story inside me was not the whole thing. And I think it’s something that perhaps not universal, but it occurs in many people. And your story gives such hope to people who have that feeling that perhaps what I’ve been told about myself to me is not the whole tale. I am fascinated by how to write a family memoir. I’ve also been waiting a long time for just the right writer to have a conversation with about family memorabilia and how to handle it when writing memoir. Some people have very little granted owing to like displacement or family trouble.

But on the opposite side of that spectrum is you, who is almost burdened with what can only be considered remarkable material. Can you set this up for our listeners please? Of course, it’s the title of your book, The Strongbox, but what was it that you were given the gives you this title for this book? Can you talk to us about that please?

Terry Sue: The strongbox was actually something my mother had. It was a metal file box that she kept her most important papers, and it was just a small little metal file box, smaller than a toaster or about the size of a toaster, I suppose, you’d say. It had random scraps and it had a wooden cigar box that had little bits of ephemera, but among that was a couple of pay stubs of hers. There were movie tickets and there was a beer bottle opener. Just peculiar random collection of items.

But there was also in there these two attorney letters that referenced child support, not saying whether it was one child or two. And there was always a question in my mind if my brother and I had the same father. Those two letters between attorneys didn’t answer that question. Could my mother have had me with one man and my brother with another man? I also have two other siblings. But the contents, we moved a lot. We lost a lot. Everything we had was always shabby and broken and torn.

And that was the same with these items in the strongbox, but they were important enough to her that she packed them from one residence to another. So while she was burdened with the disease of alcoholism, there was a strength in her. The fact that this father mystery was solved in part through the items I found from that strongbox, that box also represented the steely strength that resided in my mother beneath the alcoholism. And I feel that I too have some of that steely strength.

Marion: Absolutely. The reader takes that title and begins the book with the curiosity of the contents, but absolutely positively recognizes the inheritance, not only of the contents, but of the steely strongbox that your mother is and that you are by right. I just love the ability that you saw to use that in its myriad ways. How old were you when you first opened it? And what about those contents changed for you as you aged?

Terry Sue: I was 17 years old going on 18, somewhere in the middle of 17 and 18. And at first when I read them, my story includes my inability to read. When I first opened that, I took it surreptitiously. At that point, my mother had been gone for a year, but she still held a lot of power over me. She was a strong personality, and I was truly apprehensive about looking into her private collection of items. At first, when I looked in there, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at in terms of those letters. I didn’t really comprehend completely what they were saying.

There was a copy of her divorce decree from her first husband, and I certainly didn’t understand any of that. But what I found on that first opening was a copy of my birth certificate and there I saw my father’s name, but it wasn’t what I had been led to believe. At that point, I, again, had that gut sense of, I don’t know what the whole story is, but this is not it. It just kept nagging at me, but I was so uncomfortable by it that at that point, my coping skills were not to be inquisitive.

My coping skills were to put it all back, put it back in my closet, much the same way it had been in my mother’s closet, tucked in the back corner. And I put it away for a couple more years before other events took place in my life that gave me the courage to go one more time. I kept dipping into that strongbox looking for clues, trying to put the pieces together, and I just never got a satisfying answer. It just kept being there talking to me from the corner of the closet, but I wasn’t listening.

Marion: It’s a fascinating story of resilience, of determination, but it’s also, as you’ve just mentioned, a story that includes illiteracy, alcoholism, illegitimacy. And in the hands of many of us, those are and would remain causes for shame and attendant silence, but then you learn to read, really read. I mean, I certainly view it as this power, right, to command knowledge, to direct knowledge, to deploy knowledge. Speak to us about the fulcrum that your own literacy became to this tale of empowerment.

Terry Sue: Well, in my early twenties, I was just made painfully aware of my inability to comprehend the written word through my work. Somebody had used the word pathology and I didn’t know what it was. And when I asked, the person was incredulous. And it wasn’t that they shamed me, but I shamed myself. I knew I need to do better. Backing up just a bit, I had tried to write a letter to an address that I thought might be my father, but it was so terrible. My handwriting was terrible. We didn’t have word processors back there.

My punctuation and grammar were atrocious. I copied one for myself that I kept, so I now can look back and think, “Oh my God, this person received this letter and what must they have thought?” But I thought with this pathology incident, maybe if I could learn to read, maybe I could learn to write. And if I could learn to write, maybe I could write my father or this person another letter and do better. If I could just make myself look good, maybe he would give me the time of day. And not having any pride or sense of, again, the right to own myself and to ask for answers.

So I did start reading. I went to the library. I got the biggest book I could find, and I just told myself, “I’m going to read every word.” I had enough literacy that I could pick the words off, but I couldn’t string them together and get a sense of what I was reading to. It was an incredibly painstaking endeavor, but I did have that power of conviction. Secretly when nobody was looking, when the room was quiet, I would try and get through another few sentences. And fortunately, the story was compelling enough that it did grow.

My first book I ever read cover to cover was the autobiography of Arthur Rubinstein, the classical pianist. And when I was in the library, I was just looking for size. I didn’t know anything about literary genre or have any preferences for any particular type of book. I just wanted a big one. I was like, “This is my Mount Everest.” And it was a 600 page autobiography, and he told a terrific story. And by the end of it, I believe some of my disability is about being able to discern the black letters from the white space.

The white space really jumps off it for me. I say because they teach us to read by the shapes of the black space, not the white space, I was just blind to the… I couldn’t get the words. But with that practice, really telling myself, “Don’t go on until you know what you’ve just read,” I think I trained my synapse to start connecting with reading. Then I just took off from there.

Marion: We’re so grateful that you did. There are so many tricky places in writing family memoir. When I work with writers, I always ask them, “Who’s writing this book?” And they always think that’s an insane question. But we get further into the question, as I explain that, are you writing it from here now at this age with everything you know? Are you going to try to reanimate the person you were at six or eight or 10 or 12 or 15? Who is writing it with what amount of knowledge? And it makes for some real potholes for the writer, right, as you try to navigate that space.

And your story is then compounded in its complexity because it goes on for decades. So at what point in your actual life chronologically did you decide to write this book? And then how did you make the decision of whose point of view to tell it from? What age you were to tell it from?

Terry Sue: I was in my fifties when I started writing this, and I actually had written another book before, a work of fiction. And that work of fiction was really, again, a personal challenge. It was showing myself that I had done a 180 from that illiterate child to not only… It took me 11 years, but I ended up graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English from Mills college. Not only graduating from college, but then I thought, I had this story and the right people showed up at the right time, and I was able to write this work of fiction that’s titled Pearls My Mother Wore.

And it was just a story that hit me. I wanted to tell a story where the losers were the winners. It was a story that came to my imagination. It wouldn’t let me go, and I got it done. So when I was in my fifties, that story, the fiction, people were like, “Oh, I read your memoir.” And I was like, no, none of that ever happened. It was emotionally autobiographical in a lot of places, but none of those things ever happened. Now I have to write a memoir and I have this crazy family story. How could I ever write a memoir?

Well, when I finally got the piece that answered the father question, it was like, this is just too much. I had at this point been immersed in storytelling enough. I knew a good story when I saw it. And then I was like, how am I going to write this? Well, I thought memoir would be so much easier. I was always telling myself, in the word memoir, the first two letters are me. Keep me in the memoir. This isn’t about telling their story. It’s about telling my story. So that really anchored me. But I really went into it thinking, I know the characters.

I know the story arc. This is going to be a piece of cake. Well, it took me about four times more time to write a memoir than it did the book of fiction. And that was a surprise. But I, again, had that compelling need, this story… I would wake up in the middle of the night with parts of it. I couldn’t go back to sleep until I got them down on paper on both cases. So I think that keeping me in the story was the anchor that made it so that I didn’t feel like I was telling on anybody or ratting anybody out. That tends to be a big hurdle for memoirs I think.

Marion: I think so. I think the thing that I spent a lot of my time talking people out of is, I’m going to set the record straight. I’m going to get back at so-and-so. It’s like, no, no. It’s never a blunt object. It’s literature, so let’s keep it on the story level. And keeping it on the story level when writing family member, there are, of course, because there are people involved, differing versions of the same story. Everyone involved has their own version by the nature of experience, which means they’re going to have a different version of the truth.

So let’s talk about the truth. You just said very clearly that your truth, keeping you in the memoir, was deeply important to you. And I think that’s a great guide. But what do you do when your brother says, “That didn’t happen,” or, “It didn’t happen that way,” or, “Why do you care about this,” or any number of other things that other people in the tale believe happened?

Terry Sue: As I was writing, I was aware that I was telling this dysfunctional family story and that it felt important to me to put the reader at ease, that they were in the hands of a capable narrator, that I wasn’t leading them down this path of disastrous family narrative only to push them off at the end. I did give early on clues that my point of view would be dramatically different at the end than it was at the beginning. Early on in the story, I have a line about how making my mother happy was a critical objective for me at that time, I said.

I put these qualifying statements. If I wasn’t sure what somebody was thinking, I would say, “I’m not sure if that was even true, but this is the way it hit me,” so that the reader would always understand that I was clear that my perspective was subjective and that I was only telling the story as it arrived in my life. Although I established that I was telling it from a place of clarity, I unraveled the story on a straightforward timeline so that the reader discovers information as I discovered it. It reads like a who done it.

And I always say, instead of solving for a death, it was solving for a birth, mine. It has the momentum of, what’s she going to do now? What’s going to happen next? I don’t preempt the story with “I knew better” or anything like that.

Marion: Right. I think the structure of the way you tell it absolutely supports the story itself, and the way it unfurls, the way that you chose to tell it mirrors the story that you have to tell. And it’s a very important aspect of the success of the book, and I really compliment you on that. So many times people want to use devices that are counterintuitive to the structure itself.

When the story is, for instance, about coming to clarity about something, jumping around in time doesn’t mimic that and actually undermines the reader’s confidence in the narrator. And as you just said, you had a narrator decision to make here. We have to trust you. This is a lot of material. These are a lot of obstacles. I think you did a great job with making those decisions about how to structure it. And I can’t help but wonder if it has anything to do with what you also do for a living, which is you’re a hairdresser and a salon owner.

And I just can’t possibly do this interview without asking you, this is a place of traditional storytelling and secret keeping. We do, after all, tell our secrets to those in the beauty industry. We’ve all done it. So how did that inform you? Here’s a great leap on my enormous assumption. You might’ve had the perfect training of the story in what you do for a living. So how about it? Tell me I’m out of my mind. That’s okay.

Terry Sue: No doubt about it. My career was perfect for shaping me into the person that I’ve been. It’s something that I absolutely adore about being a hairdresser is… I think between hairdressers and bartenders, bartenders sometimes hear the story, but mostly they’re running around serving everybody. With the salon, it’s you and the client. I am a talker. I enjoy hearing people’s stories.

So when I would say, maybe something would come up around Father’s Day, “Oh, you’re doing anything for Father’s Day,” or somehow as I would get to know my clients better and better, my unguarded demeanor would open the door and my clients would start telling me stories about their own, “Oh gosh, my aunt, we never knew for sure who her father was,” or just different stories. I have very intimate relationships with these clients, but at the same time, I’m not going to show up at their family gatherings.:

I’m not going to hold anything they say against them or keep a record. It’s just a place to share thoughts and air ideas that normally stay kind of tucked into the darker places. It is a wonderful profession. Plus with not being able to read, but needing to earn some money as a young person, it was practical. There isn’t a lot of reading and writing in hairdressing, so it was a perfect profession for me. And I’m very grateful to all of my clients for supporting me. We just come to love each other.

Marion: Yeah. Also, I think there’s something that you know about storytelling that was so deeply reassuring to you perhaps because of the experience. I can’t help feeling that it made those obstacles along your way. I mean, the alcoholic parents, a biological father who does not want to be found, alternating versions of the same story. I imagine that there’s just some kind of faith in story that you were provided in that work that allows you to just keep going because…

Terry Sue: Our appointments are half an hour, an hour, couple hours long, and so it’s like, “Get to the point. So what happened,” is really kind of the narrative arc that happens in the salon. You’re absolutely right. It’s like that’s how you have to tell the story. People just want to know, so what happened?

Marion: Right. Did you leave him? Yeah, absolutely. That’s gorgeous. It’s such a fabulous place. And I miss it so much in COVID that. Sometimes the person who’s cutting your hair perhaps is telling you a story, but the woman next to you in the chair, she’s got a better story going on. You’re getting this stereophonic sort of life stories going on. I always leave there just whirling. I have a terrible habit of listening in, but hey, it’s a ripe territory for it. Yeah, it’s great. Well, speaking of story, you had previously written this novel, and you knew how to do that.

And you’ve got these many obstacles in this piece, in this life of yours. And you could have, at any point, as you were making the decision to write this book, decided to fictionalize it, which it would have allowed you to choose how it ended, because the ending per se could have happened the way you wanted it, instead of perhaps the way it did happen. Just talk to us a little bit more about, because a lot of times people say to me, “Oh, maybe I should just fictionalize my memoir.

Maybe I should just grab a hold of it in a way that I can’t in this unresolved story that I’ve got.” Just give us a little encouragement or help. How can people see their way clear to finishing a book when it might be easier, it feel better, right, to just kind of fictionalize an ending and jump out of it? But instead pursuing it to what ending you were allowed to find in your tale. How did you keep in there?

Terry Sue: As I had finished writing Pearls My Mother Wore, the aesthetic in me is like, “Oh, well, this needs to be balanced. I need to tell a father story.” So I did think after I kind of relaxed after getting Pearls My Mother Wore done and said, “God, I’m never doing that again.” But then, “Oh, well, maybe you could do a father themed story.” And as I was hunting around in my imagination for a father theme story and maybe it even being one where a daughter was looking for her father, I had very little experience with fathering.

And so every time I tried to draw a father character, it just fell flat. And I spent years sort of thinking, how could I write something and dabbling? It just never really sung the way the other story had. Like I say, it wasn’t until I got this critical piece of information that the story pivoted and there was born my father’s story. It was the real life story, and it felt so like you can’t make this stuff up. If I had written my story is fiction, people would scoff.

They’d be like, “Oh, come on.” So I had to write it as the real deal. Otherwise, I would be like, “Oh please.” I did have to just say, if I’m going to tell this story, and this is a powerful story, then I’m going to have to do it straight.

Marion: People would scoff. Yes, they would have. It’s absolutely true. I think a lot of people think, “It’s getting too hard here. I’ve got to fictionalize.” It actually would have been far harder to believe as a piece of fiction than as memoir. That’s a great point. The thing that I find fascinating about… Many things I find fascinating about the story and the way you chose to write it, it’s not about the big reveal. The big reveal you utilized was a motivation to tell the tale.

It helps you get there, but it’s really about the past home in the largest sense, the path home from finding out. I mean, what you do with it is so important. I say to people all the time, memoir is not about what you did. It’s about what you did with it. And this is a great example. This book is a great example of what knowledge you gained propelled you to do with it. You had miles to go before you sleep after a big discovery. So how did you make that decision? I mean, it’s true. Absolutely.

But I think a lot of people struggle with where to end a book and that miles to go before we sleep, that act three, that what we do with what we finally learn is such an important step. Talk to us a little bit about crafting what you do with that path home.

Terry Sue: Well, here I have to bring in my editor. She was the one who saw the epilogue in the book and just encouraged me over and over to wrap it up with that. And I’m so grateful that she did. It makes perfect sense at this point, but I can’t lay claim to entirely knowing that the epilogue was going to be the way the final page would occur. I kind of feel like I represent the opposite end of the writing spectrum. Most writers you hear, “Oh, I couldn’t get enough books as a kid. My family, we always were reading, and I was always getting books.”

I was not that. And I don’t write by hand. I don’t write in a journal. I don’t write messy first drafts. I need it to be all tidy, tidy, tidy. I’m constantly tidying up as I work to the end. And I just work very much intuitively. It’s like when I hear people say, “Oh, I could never write,” I tell them chances are you actually would be a good writer, because that judgment is you know good writing when you see it. And you’re thinking, “I can’t get there.” But once you do get there, once you hit the note that you’re really after, it’s so satisfying.

As I was working to the end and got the epilogue completed, there was just this internal bloom of satisfaction. I knew this was right, and I could stand behind it. I think that as we write, if we’re not satisfied, or at least this is my experience, when I’m not satisfied, if I get stalled out in my writing, and then I go back a page or maybe a little bit, I discover, oh, I said something that I wasn’t quite comfortable with, and my psyche is almost preventing me from going on. So I go back. I find what was it that just was…

Maybe it was just a word, maybe it was a whole passage, but it was something that didn’t really land subconsciously for me, and clean it up and then just keep moving on. By the time I got to writing the epilogue, I knew that I could stand behind the story. It did feel complete.

Marion: I love that phrase, internal bloom of satisfaction. There is an internal bloom of satisfaction. It’s kind of the story arc. I mean, you go from this quiet sense of dissatisfaction with the story you’ve been told about yourself to this internal bloom of satisfaction in that epilogue that we understand what’s been given birth to, right? We get at the end of your tale the value of knowing and the value of having a version you can live with. I can’t thank you enough for that and for coming along today.

Thank you so much, Terry Sue. It’s been a pleasure, and I really enjoyed the book and have enjoyed talking with you.

Terry Sue: Same here. Thank you for having me. Really a pleasure. I so admire the QWERTY Podcast, and I’m just thrilled to be among your guests.

Marion: Delighted. The author is Terry Sue Harms. The book is The Strongbox. Just out by She Writes Press. In all, you can see everything the author does at Terry Sue Harms dot com, and see the press at She Writes Press dot com. I’m Marion, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. Subscribe wherever podcasts are available. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at Overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach.com and take a class with me, and thanks for listening.

Want more help? I am a memoir coach, memoir teacher and memoir editor. Come see me in any one of my online classes.

Memoirama: Live, 90 minutes. Everything you need to write what you know.

Memoirama 2. Live, two hours. Limited to seven writers. What you need to know to structure a book.

How to Write Opinion Pieces: Op-eds, Radio Essays and Digital Commentary: Live, 90 minutes. Get your voice out into the world.

And keep in mind that I am now taking names for the 2022 Master Class, the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. It’s live, once a month, and limited to seven writers who are determined to get a first draft of their book-length memoir finished in six months.